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Month: December 2017

When we initially launched Etheroll in early 2017 we went live with a bare bones look and feel in order to allow us to focus on our primary concerns – development and security of our core game, token and reward smart-contracts. Since launching just over 6 months ago, Etheroll has seen over 250,000 ether wagered on more than 180,000 individual games. In that time we have run two successful reward periods paying out in excess of 2,500 ether to our valued DICE token holders.

As we look forward to 2018 we are determined to build on what we have already accomplished and one of the big ticket items for us (and our players) was a re-design of our UI/UX and branding. Today we are proud to showcase a preview of our new UI/UX moving into 2018.

In re-visiting the look and feel of our platform we have taken on-board the comments and emails we have received from our players. We have a user-centric design philosophy at Etheroll, in that we believe the users experience should feel effortless and seamless. The user should not have to think about how to use our product.

One of the difficult things with dice games, (as opposed to a blackjack game for example) is that one cannot lean on skeuomorphism to lead design decisions. There is no traditional dice game in a casino that we can borrow and translate into a digital format that the user can immediately identify with. As such, we decided to take a good look at our current layout (which seemed to function very well) and focus on the problems areas that were identified to us via the feedback we have received over the past ~6 months.

Problem areas identified in our previous designs:

Players were unsure after ‘rolling’ that a bet had initiated. There was no visual feedback to the player that a game had been initiated.

Whilst waiting for a game result there was no feedback to the player that they have moved to the next stage of the game.

Users were annoyed they had to click away from the main game screen to see recent results.

The color scheme was too contrasting which some players found to be painful to the eye particularly after a long gaming session.

The site generally lacked a professional modern look/feel that would sit nicely and in-line with cutting edge technology such as Ethereum.

The site lacked a trollbox (to be bolted on in development not currently shown).

Introducing the New and Improved Desktop UI/UX

Homepage!

Play Now – changed in build – 1 column for results now, not two.

Awaiting result…

Result!

Secondary page example

Main navigation

(Note: Keep in mind these are static images of what will be an animated/shifting kaleidoscope of tessellated colors in the background.)

Homepage
A tessellated background (which may be too dark/hard to see in these mock ups) animates softly in the background with varying shades of color, depth and size. Total bets and an introduction into Etheroll is visible, alongside the actual game on the homepage.

Play NowResults are now clearly visible on this page. The user can choose to see ‘All results’ or ‘Your results’ by flicking the tab at the top right of the results columns. We are making a few adjustments in actual build on this page. For example, results will spread across the entire 2 columns. Upon clicking roll the tessellated background becomes slightly more animated to illustrate that a game is now in progress.

Awaiting ResultThere is now a clear separation between selecting your number and submitting a bet and awaiting/seeing results. The primary focus of this page is now your target (the number you are trying to roll below) with all the clutter from the ‘Play Now’ removed from the screen. This ensures the player knows exactly what is happening and where they are at in the process of finalizing their game.

ResultThe result page is now more succinct in communicating to the user that a result is in. We achieved this by beefing up the size of the result number as well as animating the tessellated background various shades of colors that will correspond to a result. For instance on a player win the tessellated background will show green shades and on a house win red shades are shown to the players.

Secondary PagesThe game is now playable from any page on the site. Upon a player submitting a bet from any secondary page, the left hand side will display game play whilst the user can continue to browse and read right hand side content. Upon receiving a result players will be able to click through to the results page from the left hand side.

Main NavigationThe main navigation has been rolled into the header and displays as a hovered menu item over the main content area. Even though the site will act as a ‘one-pager’ and there will be no actual page reloads, URLs will be bookmarkable and accessible directly via their respective page names. This will result in a ‘snappier’ experience for the user.

Introducing the New and Improved Mobile UI/UX

We believe our updated mobile version is going to be a perfect fit for the player on the move. When we first started re-designing the mobile UI/UX version we essentially took the desktop version and converted it down into a responsive version of the desktop layout as shown below (Mobile Round 1- deprecated). Just as we were signing off the updated mobile designs, a productive member of our community posted to r/etheroll that they had created an application called Etheroll for Android which allowed Android users to play Etheroll on their mobiles (neat!) and needless to say, it caught our attention.

Inspired by the layout of Etheroll for Android we decided to go back to the drawing board for the mobile version of Etheroll.

Play Now
Two large wheels that the player activates via touch scroll to select an amount to wager and percentage chance to win options. The large roll button at the bottom of the page is large and easy to click for the mobile player. The revised mobile layout removes a lot of the small form components which the player may have found difficult to navigate on a mobile.

If the player would prefer to manually enter numbers they can click the wheels and manually input their game settings via the keyboard.

Awaiting ResultWith all the clutter from the ‘Play Now’ removed from the screen the player knows exactly what is happening and where they are at in the process of finalizing their game.

ResultResult number is displayed below the target number and the animating tessellated background changes to various shades of colors that will correspond to the result. On a player win the tessellated background displays green shades and on a house win red shades are displayed to the player.

TimingsWe expect to have the new desktop version out and into production early 2018 but won’t publish precise dates just yet. The release of the re-design will be a phased approach with the desktop version being the #1 priority as mobile clients which will be able to access Etheroll are not in production yet.

For those players that would prefer the old layout, don’t worry we have you covered – we will continue to host the classic layout on a relevant sub-domain so that you can still play using the classic retro layout – never to be forgotten.

We would love to hear in the comments section what you think of the new designs/layouts so don’t be shy and let us know what you think with a comment below.

The recent and record spike in transactions across the Ethereum network due to the popularity of Cryptokitties has caused a major backlog of pending transactions (~15k at the time of writing) network-wide which has meant player transactions have been slow to submit and slow to receive a final result.

To reduce waiting times when playing Etheroll you can use the following table from ethgasstation.info to help you choose an appropriate gas price during times of high network demand.

On our side we are looking to increase the gas price for our Oraclize callbacks up to 30 gwei from 20 gwei to alleviate the delays in waiting for a result. Currently ~87% of blocks include a transaction with a 30 gwei gas price. Be patient if you are going to play the game at the moment until we sort these teething issues out that are being caused meow by the huge backlog of txs network-wide due to the recent popularity of Cryptokitties.